Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Amazon Review Policy, Pt II

So, a month or so back I outlined a simple experiment to check some of the ongoing stories , articles, and rumors about Amazon reviews and who can post them. It’s been a month, so I figured I could toss
down a few lumps of data for your perusal.

First off,
the books I reviewed. There’s a full list below. I’ve included links to Amazon just to make it
quick and simple for anyone to follow up on each review. There’s also a few letters by
each name that cover a bunch of other variables.

t = I follow the
author on Twitter

T = We follow each other

F = Facebook friends/followers with said author

A = Amazon verified purchase

C = Control review. This should be rejected immediately,
for reasons

The dates I’m listing are
the dates I wrote and submitted the review. As mentioned in the earlier post, they all had at least twelve hours between them. Most of them went up in minutes. In a few cases cases, there was a delay of
anywhere from hours to almost two days before the review actually posted on
Amazon. And yet... every one of them did
go up.

They’re
roughly alphabetical, except in a few places where I had to swap out titles for
one reason or another (a few books I’d planned to review for this didn’t
actually come out yet...). That’s more a function of the original list I threw
together, not anything else. All of them
are books I’ve read in the past year, more or less.

I know
originally I said I’d only do positive reviews.
After the second or third day, I decided to only do five star reviews
(to smooth out one more variable).
Again, these are all honest reviews. I really, truly loved all of
these books and I think you should read a bunch of them right now or at least
put them on your Christmas list. On a
few, I mention that said book was maybe a 4.5, but I rounded up since Amazon
doesn’t allow partial stars. This also
meant I had to switch out one or two books (because believe me... not
everything I read is five-star-wonderful by a long shot).

All the
control books either have a blurb from me right on the cover or there on the
Amazon page in the editorial/press material. The one exception is Kaiju Rising, an anthology I have a story in, where Amazon lists me as
the sole author, and most of the editorial/press stuff mentions me as well. On all those reviews (as you can see) I
openly, blatantly stated my connection to the book, both for Amazon and also
so it wouldn’t look like a cheap/bogus review that might reflect back on said
author.
If there’s some factor you can
think of that I missed, please let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can
include the next time around..

Now, with
those titles and dates in mind, here’s a few things that’ve happened already...

First off,
doing a review a day becomes oddly time-consuming. Especially trying to write
an honest-I-read-this-review without giving away any spoilers.

Also, I
never knew this before, but... things people buy as gifts off your Amazon wish
list do not count as verified purchases.
Yeah, I know—weird. Creeping
Stones and Experimental Film were birthday/Christmas gifts, yet
neither reads as a verified purchase. I mention it just because I’m trying to
put down all the info I can. I’d guess
it’s because even though the item was clearly bought for you, you’re not the
one who purchased it. Something to work on, Amazon...

And as of
this writing, all thirty of them are still up. It’s
been six days since I reviewed The Voodoo Killings and over five weeks
since I reviewed Alight.

We’ll check
in on this experiment one more time in early October and see where things are
at.

Hey, Ray and Pam-- not sure where you're seeing that. All the reviews (even the "C" books) are still listed on my Amazon profile and on the individual books. Just asked a friend to double check through her account and she sees them in both places, too.

-----RANDOM FACTS-----

PETER CLINES is a generations-back New Englander (we're talking tall hats and buckled shoes and half-the-population-dies-every-winter generations-back) who broke with tradition and moved to Southern California.

After more than thirty years of writing, fifteen years in the film industry, and six years of writing about writing for the film industry, plus getting several short stories and a novel or nine published, he feels he has some experience and useful advice to offer.